Unlike normal redirects, a soft redirect is not a functionality of the wiki software. It is merely a page with a notification to users, that they will be taken to another website when clicking on the link being offered.

Soft redirects are intended mostly to point to external websites, where hard redirects will not function. For internal use in general, hard redirects should be used instead.

Another situation where soft redirects are used is when the intended target is a special page, and the system automatically "softens" attempted hard redirects to special pages. For example, en:Wikipedia:List of tags redirects to en:Special:Tags.